Christine Flowers: Justices used free will in Hobby Lobby ruling

There was a time when Catholics were not allowed to join certain clubs, fill certain jobs or marry certain people. There was a time when churches were burned to the ground, something significantly more troubling than archdiocesan mergers. There was a time, and not as far back as the Jurassic period, when a presidential candidate had to calm the fears of the Protestants by giving a famous speech in which he essentially said, “I don’t work for the pope.”

Most of us are so assimilated into the culture that we don’t dwell on those things, and that’s exactly the way it should be. Grievances get old, and whining sounds are unbecoming (especially when they come from the politically advantaged.)

But that doesn’t mean there isn’t still a sting when you feel the bite of the bigoted wasp (OK, pun intended) who aims for the jugular on those very rare occasions when it actually can. Catholics are hardly a suspect group, and despite what Bill Donohue of the Catholic League has to say, we’re doing just fine. No flaming torches on my street, last time I checked.

Still, like anti-Semitism and racism and all the other “isms” that bedevil our society because we’re human and therefore capable of immense mediocrity, anti-Catholicism is not a figment of the imagination. Most of the time it’s very subtle, as when Billy Joel writes that song about Catholic girls starting much too late, when what he really meant was that girls in plaid kilts were capable of great sluttiness.

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This past week, my “praydar” was working overtime as I noticed a very distinct and highly sophisticated form of bigotry flood the commentariat in the wake of two notable Supreme Court decisions.

First, there was the ruling that abolished those 30-foot barriers set up to keep pro-life protesters away from abortion clinics. To hear the reporters and look at the photos, you’d believe that only Catholics fight for the rights of the unborn. Picture after picture showed a close-up of rosaries, with gray-haired little old ladies kneeling in quiet prayer. Try as I desperately did, I couldn’t dig up one yarmulke or hijab, even though it’s well known that Orthodox Jews and Muslims are overwhelmingly anti-abortion.

That’s unsettling for two reasons. First, it’s unfair to other faith traditions that uphold the noble respect for unborn, innocent life. Papists do not deserve all the, um, glory such as it is. Second, by making it seem as if Catholics are the only ones who really fight the good fight against abortion, it diminishes the very real and very widespread support the pro-life cause has among the general population. There are even some atheists like Nat Hentoff who base their support for the unborn on science, something at which Justice Harry Blackmun failed miserably.

But that was just the appetizer for the feast. On Monday, the high court ruled that for-profit, closely-held companies had both the ability and the right to exercise religion under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.

And then, if you’ll pardon the phrase, all hell broke loose.

I pretty much expected the apocalyptic screams from the pro-choice crowd, a kind of secular “rapture” where they all saw the future and it wasn’t pretty (or cheap.) Tell a woman that she can’t have four out of 20 forms of birth control for free (even though she can pay for the four banned varieties) and it’s as if you’ve taken away the right to vote and replaced our smart phones with Wilma Flintstone-style appliances.

I even expected the usual, now tired chants of “keep your rosaries off my ovaries,” which would only be possible anyway if the pro-life crowd had incredible dexterity. Plus, you’d have to get awfully close to the choice ladies and while that 30-foot barrier was abolished, it’s still a stretch.

But this leads me to my main point, which is that Catholic symbolism is used, and Catholic dogma is referenced in a negative way every time the issue of birth control or abortion (or for that matter gay marriage or pedophilia) is brought up. We seem to have a general reputation for being bigoted, demanding, intolerant and very uncool (unless of course you’re Madonna, the terrestrial one, who made rosaries a fashion statement several decades ago.)

Perhaps being very outspoken about an issue triggers that animus on the part of those on the other side of the philosophical fence, and I would even concede that it’s quite fair to associate Catholicism with a Spartan brand of pro-life advocacy, but that’s not all that happened this week.

This week, there were people accusing Supreme Court justices of allowing their faith to dictate their legal rulings as opposed to the law. An editorial in this paper and many other papers came close to saying that the primary reason the five justices in the Hobby Lobby majority ruled the way that they did was because they were five Catholic justices. Of course, no one seemed to notice that Sonia Sotomayor is Catholic, and ruled against Hobby Lobby. She, however, is a wise Latina, and both her gender and her ethnicity cancelled out the unfortunate circumstances of her faith.

It always amuses me when women in particular talk about how old men in dresses should never be able to tell us what to do with our bodies. How soon they forget that it was eight old men in dresses who gave us the right to dispatch our unborn children as long as we got an early enough start.

What if I suggested that no black judge was qualified to preside over the murder trial of George Zimmerman or that no gay judge should sit in judgment of Matthew Sheppard’s killers or no Jewish judge is qualified to rule on the case of a Palestinian bomber? The implied prejudice in those hypothetical situation is no different from saying that a Catholic male jurist has an improper agenda.

People might say I’m doing here what I normally criticize, playing the “poor me” card. Perhaps. But there’s something particularly galling in the presumptuous way some people equate “Catholic” with “intellectual zombie.” Even some progressive Catholics like E.J. Dionne of the Washington Post fall in line with their partisan playmates on the left in an almost masochistic display of disgust at those bigoted (and Machiavellian) Catholic justices.

The Philadelphia Inquirer’s Tony Auth once depicted the five Catholic males on the high court as wearing papal miters. The chattering classes took a break from their brie and chablis to chuckle at that one (I guess when you have a Pulitzer people will give you the benefit of the doubt on your doubtful humor.)

But I stopped laughing a long time ago.

So let me be plain: A Catholic justice, like a Catholic president, a Catholic janitor or a Catholic doctor has free will. Just because he exercises it in a way that offends editorial boards, Planned Parenthood and thin-skinned politicians doesn’t mean he’s stupid, misogynistic, patriarchal or beholden to Rome.

And when five of them get together, it means a precedent.

Christine Flowers is an attorney and Delaware County resident. Her column appears every Sunday and occasionally on Friday. Email her at cflowers1961@gmail.com.